Jason Bourne, fifth in the cycle, is a movie
best missed.
The director co-wrote the screenplay with
the make-up artist.
Or with the grip, or the gaffer, or the
best boy.
At any rate, he wrote it with someone who
wasn’t Tony “Michael Clayton” Gilroy.
And Gilroy is the master of the Jason
Bourne mythos.
He plucked Bourne from an airport
paperback and gave him poetry and pithos.
Gilroy supplies the sadness when Bourne
goes solemnly and bureaucratically
berserk. He
Supplies the depth, and any Bourne movie
that he did not write is an automatic turkey.

Jason Bourne uses all the classic Bourne
tropes,
But so clumsily, so crudely, that we who
love the classic tropes feel like dopes.
Must Bourne be pursued again by crooked
CIA?
Must he again look swollen with
significance, while having nothing to say?
Must he again be surveilled and
satellite-tracked,
On multiple screens, in multiple scenes,
while the Agency fails to get him whacked?
The plot is crass. The great Bourne memory
mystery is misused.
And certain scenes will make no sense to
you, because through the previous scene
you snoozed.

Don’t see this movie: it’s a reverse blaster, a
time-travelling disaster, a shockwave of
such shiteness
That its wrongness blows backward and
defeats the earlier rightness.
In conception it is sufficiently forlorn
To almost put you off Jason Bourne.
It bloats the franchise.
It increases its pantsize.
I did enjoy the bit where Bourne, by
suddenly opening a metal door,
Puts a goon on the floor.
That stunning little ping!
Was quite the thing.
(Or was it more of a clang?
In which case: quite the thang.)
But even so:
No.

*

During 2016, James Parker contributed a monthly series of poems, to HILOBROW, about Jason Bourne movie scenes.